Russian keyboards

[Don Livingston]

Sarah,

A phonetic keyboard allows the student to be much more rapidly productive than a FYVA keyboard, which significantly lowers student frustrations.  I tell my own students to use whichever keyboard they like better, but I usually find that even the ones who start with FYVA (Russian standard) leave it for for an ASDF (phonetic) one.

A couple of my colleagues have argued that a student should only use the FYVA keyboard because if they ever get a job in Russia, they will have problems typing because they will have to use a FYVA keyboard there.  That's a very silly argument for two reasons.  First off, every keyboard in Russia has both Cyrillic and Latin letters printed on it.  What student, newly arrived in Russia, will be confused by the concept that pushing the key that has the Cyrillic letter on it will produce a Cyrillic letter? Not one, of course.  Secondly, the vast majority of our students will not be working in Russia, so student frustration is minimized by providing them with a keyboard that optimizes their productivity and optimally matches the pre-printed letters on the language-lab computer.  Why should we decrease the performance of the majority of our students for the sake of the minority?

I have also heard it argued that a FYVA keyboard should be exclusively used because if the student is working in Russia (already a condition that affects the minority of our students) and the student doesn't have admin privileges on the computer, then s/he will not be able to install his/her most familiar keyboard.  Well, I supposed that might happen to someone somewhere, but this argument strikes me as really stretching a point.  Even here at a ASU, a security-conscious major university, the publically accessible computers allow users to download and install keyboards made with the MS keyboard installer; there is essentially no security risk.

Lastly, let's discuss accent marks.  You as a teacher probably want to occasionally include accent marks in your handouts, and if you are gloriously demanding, you might want your students to produce accent marks in their homework.  If that is the case, wouldn't you and your students be better off using a phonetic keyboard that has the accent already available in a position that is easily typed without complicated shifts/alts/ctrls or numbers?  To the best of my knowledge, none of the pre-installed MS keyboards have such a thing.

It is these considerations that led me many years ago to compile the "Russian for Gringos" keyboard.  The letter positions match the recommendations for the AATSEEL student keyboard, the most rational phonetic system I have encountered, and the acute accent is located on the forward slash key.  If you wish to download it free of charge, you may find it at the URL below, and it does run on Windows 7 and many earlier versions.

All the best, D. E. Livingston.

Windows 7 & Vista --  http://www.public.asu.edu/~deliving/resources/vista/index.htm
Windows XP, NT & 2000 --  http://www.public.asu.edu/~deliving/resources/xp/index.htm

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